


just like playing house

by lemonsharks



Category: Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers
Genre: Banter, Cruise Ships, Dancing, Established Friendship, F/M, Flirting, Friends to Lovers, Slow Dancing, Undercover as Married, Undercover as a Couple, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-12-01 19:17:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20872256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: Shane, Niko, slow dancing and dead drops.





	just like playing house

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LJC](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LJC/gifts).

“Don’t think about stakes,” Shane tells her, left hand on the small of her back, as she leads them out onto the dance floor in a way that makes it look like he’s pushing. 

Niko doesn’t need the tangle of emotion he holds between his fingertips and his shoulder blades to know he’s swallowing back every single time he went farther than he had in him because the assignment was _important_. 

To the League of Planets. 

To the Galaxy Rangers. 

To _him_. Or to her. 

“Easier said,” she replies. She files down the edge in her voice. “I won’t let--never mind.”

Shane leaves it be. Thank goodness--he’s broadcasting emotion everywhere. They’re lucky she’s the only person with better than nominal psi powers within five hundred meters. 

The pianist the low stage at the back of the room urges more couples out onto the floor, including their contacts: A man in his mid-thirties, wearing a bolo tie and a scowl; on his arm, a staid young humanoid woman in iron-black silk, cut low. Almost forty couples, and a few triads, wander out to dance. They crowd the space just enough to irritate. 

_We need to get to that girl,_ Niko thinks, gritting her teeth. 

If everything has gone right, she’ll lose a glove inside a plant in the back corner of the ballroom. Inside the glove would be a microchip, hopefully, better intelligence than they’d found on Geezi the memory bird. 

She doesn’t actually remember the last time everything went right. Possibly during basic training, where all you have to is what you’re told. 

The musician begins to croon in a loungey jazzy style; Shane moves to lead, and it’s only by the grace of extremely high heels that she can keep her eye on the woman. 

“He’s _not good_,” Shane says with a wince and a wry smile.

“It _is_ a cruise liner--I bet we could do better ourselves,” she replies, then pauses. “Take us around the back wall, please.”

“Yes ma’am,” he says, smirking. 

The words send a shiver down her spine, which Niko tucks away to inspect at a better time. Right now, they have the Queen of the Crown’s smugglers to talk to. And incriminate. 

As the music moved up in tempo, Shane spun and dipped her so she met their target’s eyes, upside-down and barely three meters away. The other woman winked; then she and her partner were away, lost in the crowd. 

Shane pulls her close when she rises from the dip.

“Did our friend lose her keys?” he asks, their code for making the drop.

“I think so,” she whispers.

Niko’s heart flutters in her chest while they spin and weave along the edge of the room, tachycardia she could pin on seven hundred different things, but her range is very, very good and she can’t feel ill-intent on anyone tonight. She snatches a black lace wristlet glove from among perlite and ficus roots. In a blink she passes it into Shane’s big palm; he tucks it into a secret pocket between her where the sea green satin of her dress comes away from her shoulder blades. 

Safe. For now. 

“We’ve got at least twelve different ways we could blow out of this popsicle stand,” Shane says, but she shakes her head. 

“Not yet.”

“I’m not _that_ good a dancer,” Shane teases. Then he says, low-voiced with brows knit together, “I don’t see a spotlight on us.”

_Asking if I think we’ve been made_. 

For a moment guilt flashes through her, coloring her cheeks--this is a serious job, with real consequences. But she’s enjoyed dancing--moving, touching, even playing _house_. Their luxury spaceliner is a far cry from the dirtball-planets and outlaw dirtbags they usually bring the law to, and it’s been _nice_. Not that she minds the dirtball-planets, but sometimes--. 

They have a _spa_. 

The shower in the honeymoon suite has ten different showerheads, and the soap smells like lillies and ginger. 

And now all they have to do is keep track of a data chip. 

She still hasn’t quite given herself permission to _enjoy_ the job. 

Niko shakes her head and cracks a smile; Shane relaxes. So do the strains of piano as the pianist moves into a long solo. 

“We’re supposed to be newlyweds, _hubby._” 

“Yeah, I’m not really a _‘hubby’_ type, little lady.”

“Shane, what--” 

_This _spin leaves her breathless and dizzy, with Shane the single stable figure in the ballroom in his silver-buttoned black suit and tousled hair. She recovers quickly, thanks to her training and her implant, but neither does anything to calm the flush on her cheeks and neck, hot beneath the escaping tendrils of her hair.

“C’mon,” he says. The music slows and rises, and he dips her at the peak of crescendo. When she comes back up, he’s wearing--to use his own words-- _the_ smuggest, shit-eatingest grin she’s _ever_ seen. “_You_ like dancing.” 

“I never said I didn’t,” she replies, sharp but not biting. “It can be meditative if you--”

_Spin. Dip. Rise._

“With _me_,” Shane says. “You know I’m right.”

They haven’t stayed out on the floor so long _just _for the sake of appearances. She weighs, again, the unknown of saying something against the known of their friendship, the ease they’ve built over three years working and living together in tight quarters and life-or-death missions. No one else has taken an implant successfully--neither of them can just be _reassigned_.

But here, it’s different. They’re deep enough undercover, so well covered by their stories, the things she says here and now in green and gold don’t weigh nearly as much as those same words would with blue and white against her skin. 

“I don’t _not_ like dancing with you,” she says, after a long pause. 

Shane tenses a little at the words, then forces his features and his body back into a facsimile of relaxation. He lets her go when the song fades out. 

_And we’re cracked either way_, she thinks.

Then she sees how much the ballroom has emptied around them. A handful of stragglers sip cocktails at their tables, servos refilling their thin-stemmed crystal glasses on request. But almost everyone has turned in for the night. 

“Come on,” she says, wishing she could unwind the last four minutes of her life and do them over. “We have to call home sometime.”


End file.
